In This Issue – Jan Feb 2014

Happy New Year!

Welcome to the January–February issue of Yoga Chicago magazine. This issue features several stories to inspire you on physical, mental, and spiritual levels for the upcoming year. TV host, author, and teacher Sylvia Ewing offers us tips for attaining a more reflective, balanced and happy life in 2014; Dr. Jerry Gore gives us new insights about health, weight loss, and fats; Vladimir Kazinets, an ayurvedic consultant, inspires us to get up early in his article about sleeps, dreams, and insomnia.

And welcome to the new Yoga Chicago website, which we’ve updated since March 1999. We hope you like the new look!

Tricia Fiske was first a personal trainer, working one-on-one with private cardio clients, and taught step aerobics, spinning, and Nia (a fitness program that combines martial arts and dance set to music) before she gave it all up for yoga. She was halfway through her...

Eb & flow Yoga and the Young Professional Board of Franciscan Outreach raised more than $1,000 to support Chicago’s poor and homeless at a fundraiser on December 4 at Eb & flow Yoga Studio, located in Chicago’s Bucktown/Wicker Park neighborhood. The event...

I'd like to welcome you to 2014 with one my favorite observations: "If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." It's been my experience that this applies to our lives and how we manifest our greatest hopes and dreams. This is a perfect...

I recently volunteered at an elementary school during their seasonal celebration. I staffed the craft station, a 12-seat table with watercolors, colored pencils, and paper bags. As children arrived, I explained the activity: “Today we're making lanterns. A lantern is...

One of my patients recently referred me to some reading material about healthy weight loss ideas. We discussed the theory that a person could lose weight by eating more fats, not less! As unbelievable as it sounds, it’s true. By staying off refined sugars and keeping...

Sleep Sleep is a physiological state of dormancy of the human body, mind, and senses organs--the eyes, ears, tongue, nose, and skin. Sleep, called nidra, can be literally translated from Sanskrit as “nurse, feminine, maternal, nourishing,” because it feeds and...

When we arrived in Varanasi at midnight, the bus driver asked us where we were staying. We showed him a printout of the reservation we’d made online, and he dropped us off on a brightly lit but mostly deserted main street and pointed down the road. Kaletis and I...

Setting up the pose: From a wide leg stance, turn right leg out and left leg in, lining up heel to heel with hips facing forward. Place right hand on right hip and reach left arm to the sky. Exhale and extend through the ENTIRE left side as you reach your left hand to...

Before there was yoga, there was Charles Atlas in the 1920s transforming “97-pound weaklings into men.” Jack LaLanne, the godfather of physical fitness, opened his first health studio in Oakland, California, in 1936. Resistance training and Nautilus fitness equipment...

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its...

One of my students, a nurse, noticed the red lesions on my elbows and remarked that I had psoriasis. She had the same malady and added that psoriasis is incurable. Psoriasis can indeed be a devastating, humiliating skin disease. Fortunately, I hadn’t had any...

There are many ways to define freedom. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary says that freedom is the “quality or state of being free…liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another…ease or facility…a political right.” Freedom can be viewed as the ability...

Children enjoy challenges, so it’s easy to add poses and activities to a yoga practice that help them strengthen and develop an awareness of their core. Some poses that create engagement and strength are kakasana (crow), Vasisthasana (side plank, named after the sage...

Continued from the November–December, 2013 issue ... Q: According to yoga philosophy, there is order in the universe, there are no accidents and everything is caused. Does this mean that everything is as it should be? And how can people make positive changes in their...

"The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold, wet day." —Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat “Like the seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.” —Kahlil Gibran, On Death Many of us have difficulty...

A mantra is a sound, syllable, or a series of sounds and syllables used for meditation. The word “mantra” derives from the Sanskrit root “man,” meaning “to meditate.” This same root appears in Greek as “menos” (mind) and in Latin as “mens” (mind). In English we have...

Candlelight, bright yellow flowers, freshly cut fruit, and incense provided a shimmering and pungent backdrop for the evening puja (worship) to celebrate the Hindu new year, Deepavali (or Diwalii), the Festival of Lights. It was an engaging event that connected...

Chase Bossart is a longtime personal student of T.K.V. Desikachar of Chennai, India (Desikachar is the son of T. Krishnamacharya, often referred to as the father of modern yoga, and one of the most influential yogis of the 20th century). Chase, who is based in...

The Making of a Yoga Master: A Seeker’s Transformation By Suhas Tambe Radical Healing: Integrating the World’s Great Therapeutic Traditions to Create a New Transformative Medicine By Rudolph Ballentine, M.D The Making of a Yoga Master: A Seeker’s...